Backing up the diplomatic dance on Syria: Editorial

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry speaks during a joint news conference with British Foreign Secretary William Hague and French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, unseen, following their meeting at the Quai d'Orsay in Paris, Monday, Sept. 16, 2013. The U.S. and its closest allies laid out a two-pronged approach in Syria on Monday, calling for enforceable U.N. benchmarks for eradicating the country's chemical weapons program and an international conference bolstering the moderate opposition. (AP Photo/Francois Mori)

Diplomacy is an excellent alternative to war, even when its byzantine twists, rhetorical and otherwise, remain mostly mysterious to those not born to wear a pin-striped suit and a Brahmin’s poker face.

It’s so mysterious, in fact, that even the Scandinavian sages who annually award the Nobel Peace Prize for “the best work for fraternity between nations” bestowed it upon Henry Kissinger amidst the Vietnam War and Barack Obama when he had been president for just a few months and had engaged in very little foreign policy.

These peacemakers, they move in such understated ways. Perhaps nothing should surprise us. Still, it came as a shock that what had looked to be an impending shooting war involving the United States and Syria over the issue of chemical weapons has apparently been replaced by a diplomatic initiative spearheaded by our nation’s frequent global adversary, Russia, and our own diplomats.

Last week at this time, just as President Obama was trying and failing to raise national support for an air strike, the proposal to get the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad to voluntarily relinquish its chemical weapons was first made by the Russians.

This week, after shuttle diplomacy by Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterparts, with a lot of advice from American allies from Britain to France to Israel thrown in, there is an actual agreement to deal with the Syrian chemical stockpile through negotiation, inspection, removal and supervised destruction rather than through Tomahawk missiles or drone strikes.

So, two cheers for diplomacy. If the swift punishment for a genocidal crime against both a people and international law isn’t being delivered, to the extent that what we’re seeing in the Middle East is the usual proxy war with the threat of involving superpowers, we should all be relieved.

Talk therapy has, for the moment, won the day.

Even a tough guy like a former Israeli chief of military intelligence goes so far as to call it “a win-win-win-win for Russia, the United States, Syria and Israel.” That, Amos Yadlin, is a lot of wins.

The editorial board said last week that it’s time to try to make diplomacy work, and it may be that it has.

But it’s hardly being unduly skeptical to note that this is the very same Russia that, when originally presented with the physical evidence that chemical weapons had been used in Syria, declined against all logic to believe in that evidence.

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And suddenly it now not only believes the banned agents that killed some 1,400 Syrians exist — it wants to help oversee their removal and destruction?

That’s quite a philosophical turnaround. It’s also quite possibly a simple attempt to buy time for Russia’s ally in Damascus. Because the Russians still insist that perhaps it was the rebels who used the gas to kill their own sympathizers.

Now that the diplomatic dance is underway, and the fine points about who will decide if and when all the chemicals and the ability to produce more are being worked out, it can’t be ignored that the threat of airstrikes may have been key in making them unnecessary.

That threat can’t be taken off the table if we want diplomacy to work. And if chemicals were to be used again, the consequences should be wholly clear.